I use the workaround posted by Devil999 a few posts back: press Alt-F2 and type 'r' (just the letter). Then take the screenshot. It's not a fix, but it has always worked for me.

My problem is that it also affects Skype.. I use it's "share your screen" feature, but it just shows my background on the other users end. I'll just install Ubuntu 12.10, and hopefully it doesn't give me the same problems.

I just wanted to see if I could share some information that I've found in this issue, and possibly get a response?

I've been trying to use VLC to stream my desktop to a file, but whenever I start it, it only gives a single image. I believe these two issues are connected, though, as when I tried to take a screenshot to troubleshoot it, my screenshot only took a picture of what VLC was showing:

I did some testing and I experience the black screenshot problem only when using my integrated graphics card. Also when picking colors etc from the screen it only returns black. When using the discrete grapics card taking screenshots and other stuff works fine. (I have an ATI 6720G2)

OK, I've got the solution. I have just upgraded my Linux Mint from 14 "Nadia" to 15 "Olivia" and everything is fine now. I also use to have diferent bugs conected with Graphics, but after upgrading everything works excellent. Guys did their jobs

I strongly recommend to upgrade to Olivia for those, who have ATI/AMD Graphics Card.
Greathings!

The problem seems to have been fixed with the latest version of Cinnamon. After months of deliberation, I've finally decided to take the plunge back into Arch Linux. Arch (as of writing) has Cinnamon 1.8.8 in its repos. I installed Arch along with Cinnamon yesterday, and I'm happy to say that I no longer have this issue regarding FGLRX and Cinnamon. I'm currently using Cinnamon 1.8.8 with SLiM as the display manager, and I'm pretty satisfied.

To those who have this problem: upgrade to the latest version of Cinnamon, if you have Linux Mint 14, try upgrading to Linux Mint 15, like jaskmar said. Regarding LMDE, 1.8 should be either in the romeo repository or the official repositories. Not sure which. It was in romeo last time I checked but it's possible that it has made it to the main repos now.

I'm use AMD E-450 with full install , and this problem is still show.
I saw some reply say image we're capture is in /home/images....
Maybe they got the wrong idea with this thread. We know where's
the capture's place. But the images we got is all black.

When I take a screenshot it seems to do so of whatever is below the view I see. So sometimes I take a screenshot of my Desktop Wallpaper. This happens on LMDE and uBuntu running Cinnamon 1.8 and 2.0. I'm an AMD GPU user. That seems to be the common thread here but the issue goes away if I swop back to Unity.

So, from what I gather Cinnamon had problems with fglrx because fglrx is hard to work due to it being closed source AMD stuff. Then, one day they worked around it in a new version for Cinnamon.

My problem is, I'm on a slightly older card, and I've had to use fglrx-legacy (http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=124012)

and I think whatever problem was fixed with fglrx, still remains with the legacy driver. I'm still getting the screenshot bug, the buggy textures when I expo my workspaces, entire screen blipping when something new shows up on the tray bar..

Is there possibly something I can change in Cinnamon to make whatever magic they used work on the legacy driver? Hopefully I'm not SOL for using older hardware...

Hello, I am having the issue with the screenshots from Shutter making only black screenshots. I am running Linux Mint 15 Olivia. My video card is the A10 APU and my drivers are FGLRX. I am attempting to change them to the recommended Xorg drivers to see if that fixes the problem. Will update if this works. Rebooting now.

To those that are stuck with (or don't want to update) an older Cinnamon version: I got rid of this issue by updating my linux kernel from 3.5 to 3.12, and updating the fglrx driver from 13.4 (lastest stable) to 13.11 (still beta, but pretty stable as far as I can tell). To update, first [url=http://askubuntu.com/questions/119080/how-to-update-kernel-to-the-latest-mainline-version-without-any-distro-upgrade]upgrade the kernel[/url], then reboot. Since the 13.4 driver is not compatible with linux 3.12, so you will be stuck in fallback mode. From here, uninstall any previous version of the proprietary driver you had (I have used Debian packages to install it, so "sudo apt-get remove fglrx" did the trick), then [url=http://support.amd.com/fr-fr/download]download[/url] (cannot give a direct link, sorry), unzip and install the beta drivers :

Work around, if not a SOLVED
I have just used Synaptic Package Manager to install AMD's fglrx-amdcccle-updates 2.12.104-0unbunitu0.0.1.
SPM describes this as Catylst Control Centre Linux Edition, which I guess is what the acronym means.
SPM said it would delete fglrx-amdcccle, the latest version of which appears to be 2.8.960-0unbuntu1.1.
I see there are other fglrx-amdcccle versions with 'experimental' in their names. I did not touch these.